A Pretty Little Fire
by AlienZombies
Summary: We all have our demons, our ways of curing them. AU NICKXELLIS, pyro!Nick, PTSD!Ellis, repost


Note: I'm re-uploading this just because I don't like it sitting there uselessly in my fanfiction folder like a red-headed stepchild. It's not my favorite but here we go. It's meant to be very AU (could-have-beens) so that's something for you to chew on. THIS IS NOT ONE OF MY HAPPIER FICS. Cheers.

Another note: Ellis has PTSD because of the zombie apocalypse, if you're wondering about his behavior.

**A Beautiful Little Fire**

Nick had always had a weakness for lighting small fires.

At four years old he had tasted sulfur for the first time, held the delicate stick between his thumb and forefinger and watched the flame chew up the little red bulb of a head and the blackening wooden neck before the heat began to nip at his fingertips. He yowled and thrust the match onto the floor and watched it smolder there, not lighting the linoleum as he had pictured, not engulfing his home in flames. It burned there without flame, glowing and smoking, and then it blinked out like a sleepy eye and was dead. Nick stared down at his blunt, stinging fingertips and then reached mechanically for another match and then another until the entire pack lay spent on the floor. He would never forget that bittersweet smell of smoke. And when the fire alarm had gone off, Louise was stirred from her Valium-induced stupor but not enough to break her from the heavier layer of her dreams and she lay there screaming in her damp nightgown until the fire department came. When it was over, she held Nick to her small, pointy breasts and cried and he stared blankly into the dark curve of her neck and tasted smoke on his tongue. She had always smelled to him like a dusty old dress, a kind of damp sugary smell with an underlying tang of sweat.

"Nicky, don't you ever do that again," she said over and over to him, her pupils blown out and hiding her green irises. He stared up at her and he loved her with every ounce of his being, and he hated her, too.

"I won't, Mommy," he promised, even crossing his heart and hoping to die; but when Percy came home she told him about it anyway and Nick was hauled into the bedroom by his hair and taught a solid lesson. The fire of his father's anger burned in the pit of him, and for the rest of his life he fed that flame with a bitter tinder until the blaze engulfed him and whittled him down to a black spirit.

He didn't stop lighting fires. He learned to do it in the back yard, squatting in the grass where the neighbor's unhealthy daughter Susan sat on the back porch of her home and watched him with distant eyes. When he looked at her, the whites of her eyes would show and she would grunt like an animal, sort of. She had some weird disease of the brain, Nick understood that, but it didn't stop him from flicking smoldering match heads at her and making her cry.

When he was older, in seventh grade, he started lighting fires to bigger things. Not much bigger – it started out with candles, and then small piles of trash. He liked to feel the blast of heat against his face, liked to feel the way the flame seemed to devour the air and suck it from his lungs. It was as if he was drowning in the pit of hell, and it was a good feeling to have that power.

"Beautiful," he said quietly, at the age of sixteen, as he watched the abandoned house in the country char and crumble in on itself. Frankie, his best friend, moaned over and over that it wasn't right, it was a bad idea, but Nick couldn't help himself. He stared directly into those golden depths and felt like he had reins on the sun.

"The cops are gonna come," Francis said. He was watching the corona of the inferno lick at the black outline of the sky. He still had hair then, dark and wild, and the light caught in each amber strand and reflected it and if Nick hadn't had Cookie at the time he might have grabbed at Francis and hurt him and kissed him, too. But those feelings were much blacker, blown away by the pit of the swirling heat.

"Let the cops come," Nick said, tasting the sharp coppery taste of his own blood. He had bitten his lip.

Francis looked at him with wary eyes and turned on a brazen smile. He had pierced his ears two weeks ago, and it had made his mother mad. He had a beautiful masculine jaw and kind eyes that sometimes belied the pain he had lived with since his father discovered cocaine, and as the fire in the farmhouse reached the rafters, it swelled at the extra kindling there was a great pulsation of the air and a jet of hell's tendrils reaching for the sky and Frankie's skin turned orange and seemed to burn with an internal heat. And then Nick _was_ kissing him, tasting a plain but wonderful taste of a mouth naked of lipstick or gloss, and Francis punched him and knocked him back onto the gravel road where they had been standing (stay out of the grass, Nick had said, because the fire could catch that drying fuel and sprint across the length of the field before God could pluck them up by their running feet). Nick tasted more blood and the thick smoke and the dust stirred up about their feet; he laughed and Francis, shaken, began to laugh too. The stars were gone, guttered out by the competitive glow of the burning farmhouse.

"Here," Francis said, and gave Nick a cigarette, and Nick had been smoking since eighth grade. He loved the taste of smoke, the taste of fire. He sat on the gravel and lit up the cigarette.

He watched the inferno stroke the sky, breathing in. The most perfect moment of his life.

Then he began to graduate to gasoline. He blew up a dumpster in the back of his school building, and the firestarting stopped. And when he was grown up, he still felt – especially when he lit a cigarette, when he let the stick burn down to the padding of his fingertips before he blew it out – that the desire was not gone, but dormant and waiting, waiting for something bigger, a more beautiful burn.

* * *

The snapping, hissing whisper of the fire spoke to him like a million voices. He was helpless to do as they commanded.

* * *

Neither of them liked winter, and the memories of the east drove them westward. They settled together by some unspoken agreement in an apartment in Arizona, which was a more dry heat than Ellis was used to and made his skin dry out. Over the span of weeks and then months and finally years, Ellis's tentative talk about moving out seemed to become less like promises and more like whimsy, and then a familiar joke that made Nick smile and kiss him, a disarming move in the midst of the small, petty fights that sometimes broke out of extended intimacy.

The obsession started up again seven years later. Nick went to the store and bought a pack of matches, though he had been using handheld lighters to light his cigarettes. He sat in a park bench and lit each match slowly, with the tender fervor of a man meeting an old lover. He breathed in the smoke through his open mouth, feeling his heart rate slow, and he loved the gentle, familiar heat against the tips of his fingers as the match burned out to its last little stump. When he was done, he came home and swept Ellis up in his arms, making him laugh.

"Your hair is goin'," Ellis said fondly, pushing his thick, callused fingers through Nick's thinning mane. Nick hated it when he did that, because it took forever to get his hair right and organized. It had a natural tendency to want to curl.

"We should buy some candles," Nick murmured against the smooth, cool plane of Ellis's forehead. "Why don't we ever light up the fireplace?"

"Don't know. Do you want to?"

"I do want to."

"I'm not sure if I like it," Ellis said, and pulled away. Those blue, depthless eyes searched Nick with a perfect, practiced scrutiny; his mouth pulled thoughtfully to the side as he bit the inside of his cheek. "I don't like the smell."

The purifying, cutting smell of burning bothered Ellis. It reminded him of the ghettos where a single stove left on would burn down entire city blocks, and the pungent stink of a dozen, a hundred burning bodies would carry down the street like a fog. People would crawl through the doorways, starved and burning up, some infected and some not – but that was the worst, their desperate screaming, the high stench of the rotting corpses lighting up, the darkening of the sun by the layers of smoke.

"We don't have to," Nick promised Ellis, understanding that basic reflexive fear, and Ellis turned on that honeyed smile.

"We can do the candles, though," he compromised.

They did the candles. It was Nick's job to light them, and every night he would lick his fingers and pinch the little flame out. He fantasized, sometimes, about not bothering, dreamed about the curtains catching flame, the cursive, curling heat cradling him in his sleep. He would wake hot, scalding, breathless, and no matter how he gasped for air he could only taste the bitter, dry cloud of smoke.

* * *

Nick was forty years old, Ellis twenty-eight. They landed on their feet. The psychiatrist, a sallow-looking woman with a cheesy complexion told them that they were making remarkable progress. They didn't share everything with her, because each complaint was met with medicine, with longer talks, with more pointless time. They went home and dealt with the deeper, more infected places with their own antiseptic, by keeping busy and hanging onto each other like two men freefalling into the center of the earth. Nick had been dreaming of fire for a while now, but had not yet bought the matches or the candles.

Again and again, Ellis woke screaming in the night. At first, they did not sleep together, but the noise was so awful – a man screaming is a terrible sound, a raw and honest and dreadful noise that seems to cut through the air with a pure intention – that it would start Nick from his shallow dreams and send him sprinting out of his room. Almost always, Ellis was in his bed and still asleep or on the barest fringes of consciousness, screaming at a black phantom that wasn't there, and when Nick touched him he broke that fragile layer, bursting up like a man surfacing from water, gasping and trembling and wet. Sometimes he cried or, rarer still, he would strike out blindly before the quiet bedroom registered in his muggy, panicked mind.

Once, on a pale night in November, Ellis started screaming in his sleep. Nick went to his room, hardly awake, by some automatic reaction to comfort him, but the bed was empty, the sheets tousled from Ellis's typical spastic sleep. Ellis was not in his room, found standing and shrieking in the center of the living room for no particular reason. His head was cocked to the side like a baffled child, and while his eyes were open and staring he saw nothing at all. And that was when the pills started to come, after that, after that terrifying moment in Nick's life when he wasn't sure if he was dreaming after all, that image of Ellis standing vacantly and howling as if murdered, the sharp moonlight and citylight cutting through the window and striking off his stronger features with a horror-movie effect. He had bitten through his tongue and blood spilled down his chin and, oh, God, for the first moment Nick was sure, so sure that he had rewound in time and this was all wrong. But the pills smoothed it over for Ellis, and the screaming stopped, though now he was prone to spontaneous fevers and the dark, pitched moods that made Nick fearful that he might come home and find his lover dead.

"It's better here," Ellis said once as Nick came through the door. "Isn't it? It's better here."

The sun was setting, lit up the sky like fire.

"It could be worse," Nick agreed. He felt cold and craved the heat.

* * *

Janie Marsh, who was twenty years old, climbed a lamp post and hung herself with some wire she had found. It didn't break her neck, nor did it strangle her – rather, she hung there from the post, some grotesque gangly fish on the end of a fishing pole, thrashing and flailing as the wire cut through the flesh of her neck like a string through modeling clay. Blood spilled down her front, darkening her white T-shirt and glistening in the bald light of the lamp post, and as she died she made a low, keening, gurgling noise that was not quite human. Her tongue swelled up and poked between her teeth.

Nick watched her die. It had been two weeks in the quarantine camps. He sat out on the crate by the entrance of his tent and watched her climb and jump and die. It occurred to him dimly that he ought to say something to stop her – but she was not the first, not the last, and his stomach was filled with a creeping, sour numbness.

They buried the bodies out behind the camp where the smell would not cause panic. The soldiers came and took her down, and as reward for keeping quiet they gave Nick a carton of cigarettes.

It felt good to let them burn.

* * *

He dreamed about her dying, but instead of blood spurting from her surprised mouth, it was fire. It scorched her hair and smelled kind of like alcohol. Sometimes in these dreams, her head went up like a Barbie doll, the skin melting like wax, but today she only puttered out, a match in a sealed jar.

"Cookie, I'm sorry," he said to her, feeling her pulse stop beneath his thumbs. Her eyes rolled in their sockets like planets in stunted orbit.

* * *

"Sometimes I really hate you," Ellis said. He rubbed his wrist with that accusatory look in his eyes and Nick loathed him with that same titanic power with which he had loathed everyone he loved.

"I didn't mean to do it," Nick replied, but the words had lost a lot of their purpose, hanging limp in the air. Useless.

"I don't know what you're runnin' from."

"Me either, kiddo."

Ellis had wanted a child once. He mentioned it once after sex, only once, while Nick sat smoking and coating his skin with a gentle layer of white smoke. When he had gotten no reply, he had been quiet, sealing up in that weird way he sometimes closed up, as if some violent reaction was building in him and he had to cap it before it exploded. Nick believed that there had once been a boy who knew just how to break open that dangerous volcano of emotion – a boy who was dead or missing, now, and who Ellis had stopped telling stories about for running on three years. Nick had no key to that lock. There were secrets he could not uncover. He would always pale in comparison.

Grabbing at Ellis's wrist again, Nick began to shout. A candle was upended and started catching on the songs Ellis had been writing, blackening the edges. There was no reason for it, but Ellis started to cry. He bit at his fingernail, a nervous habit, and waited for Nick to put it out; in a way, they were running in reverse.

"I'm sorry," Ellis said quietly, and Nick said, "Me too" though he wasn't, not in the gut of him, and the opaque look in Ellis's eyes said that he knew.

Nick went into the bathroom and lit match after match, his hands trembling; he rubbed the ashes between his fingers to feel the grain.

* * *

He woke yelling in the night, certain he had heard that horrible, distant weeping – but Ellis was sound asleep.

He wondered when the nightmares would ever end. There was another lake of fire, another wave of charred bodies lunging for him with bloody, smoldering hands, as the swamp around him burned into infinity. No escape, no way out.

* * *

A new boy was hired at the garage where Ellis worked. His name was Kyle. He was wild-haired and friendly, with a small voice that didn't match his towering frame. He voice flickered in and out, crackling like the voice of fire, and Nick took in his sunny appearance and was filled with loneliness. This boy had not seen death. Ellis invited him over for drinks and regaled him with stories.

And then, as darkness began to fall, Kyle struck up a cigarette. That want, that need to light a bigger blaze set up in Nick's heart.

Suddenly, his beer tasted scummy like swamp water. He set it aside as Kyle left for home. He left a lingering smell like woodsmoke.

"I seen you looking at him," Ellis said in a soft voice as he snuffed out the candles.

Nick had no response. At the time he had done it, his mind was a blank pit.

Sighing, Ellis turned off the television and went to bed.

* * *

Nick lit up a trashcan in an alleyway, standing back and watching the narrow orange flames lick at the strip of sky above. The warmth was minimal, carried by no wind. It did not satisfy his need. It filled him with a restlessness for more.

* * *

A weakened strain of the infection cropped up in some obscure country in Africa. Simultaneously, by some weird gun-squad agreement that if they all fired at once the blame could be placed on no one, the greater nations of the world blew that little piece of Africa to shit. They dropped three atomic bombs on it, almost all at once, leveling a crater bigger than Texas. It caused havoc with the weather on a global scale for quite a while, though no one noticed anymore.

Part of Nick wished they would show the footage on the news, but they would not. He dreamed about that enormous plume of fire and cinders, the sweet hard concussion of the impact tearing trees from their roots, the way the air would be sucked away and swallowed by the intense, poisonous heat.

In the morning, he rolled over and tried to coax Ellis into sex, but Ellis started to cry in that helpless way that hinted at another valley in the shifting landscape of his moods. The crying was the good part, because after that it was that same murky, bitter hopelessness that Nick knew all too well, had experienced with a grueling consistency as a child. It was the sort of morbid, black thinking that made Ellis murmur to Nick, "I wonder what it would be like to die" and this, this aftershock was not who Ellis was, the Ellis who loved living with such an intense passion it left Nick drowning in his wake. This was something manufactured from those long wet nights where the sound of footsteps outside the door never dissipated or trailed off, that fear of death tainting everything they did, living for the next few seconds of rotting food and some distant hope of rescue as they climbed over bodies and destruction and repeated disappointment.

"I'm real sorry," Ellis whimpered against Nick's shoulder.

"It's okay," Nick told him, even though afterwards he went and lit up the fireplace just to make Ellis nervous. And when Ellis put it out and gave him that worried, confused look, Nick pretended not to remember what was wrong.

* * *

"We're less of men than we ought to be, because of this," Ellis said softly. He rubbed at his graying stubble. "I wonder if I'll ever throw it off my back, if I'll ever stop dreamin' bout it."

Nick, mechanically playing with his cigarette lighter, felt like he was going colorblind. Everything around him was dulling. He remembered the shape of the girl, swinging from the lamp post, her eyes bulging in the exposing light, the naked light, as the wind pushed her like a hideous victory flag. The pungent, sweet smell of disinfectant, the smooth and gritty taste of the cigarettes he held in his shaking hands.

"Probably never," he said, and Ellis looked at him with surprised eyes. "What, am I supposed to lie?"

"No, I guess not," Ellis whispered. "God, what's the point of goin' on?"

It wasn't like him to talk like that. It had become more and more frequent. Nick had recently been lighting up newspapers, page by page, until nothing but the charred core remained. Ellis's pretty white leaves were curling in on themselves, devoured by smoke, and this was a fire that Nick had started and could not put out.

* * *

Nick called Kyle up and fucked him while Ellis was out with a few work friends. The relief of it seemed minimal in comparison to the slick ugliness he felt building up inside him. He sat smoking beside the dozing man, counting the minutes, and by some macabre experimentation he stubbed out his cigarette on the exposed flesh of Kyle's shoulder. Kyle screamed and then, after a little while, ran out, leaving the door standing open.

Slowly, calmly, Nick cleaned up the sheets. Ellis wouldn't notice – Nick was clean to begin with.

It didn't make him feel any better. And when Ellis came home, he could sense it in a way. The candles weren't burning. His mouth thinned out, just like Nick's mother used to do before she swallowed up all of her pills and started jittering on the bed, foaming bloody spit, before Nick's mother died and left them alone with no legacy at all.

"Throw your pills out," Nick insisted, and for a minute he couldn't see, he was so afraid and angry – of everything, of the universe and of himself. He could see Ellis in that red nightgown in that old bedroom, his mouth full of bloody bubbles like some rabid animal, and he couldn't stand it, couldn't stand that thought.

"I need those," Ellis said. He got that cotton-mouthed look of an addict, but Nick was immovable. "I need those, I said." They argued, red-faced, chasing each other to and from the bathroom in a tug-of-war of will.

Nick flushed them, held Ellis as he let out a few frustrated screaming sobs, told him again that it was okay, it was worth it.

"You don't smell right," Ellis said, so sensitive to the slightest change.

Even without the pills, he never woke screaming in the night again.

* * *

Nick was thirty-five. He watched the bridge explode, the mushroom flames leaping up from the water, the tiny bodies smoldering as they sailed through the open air like tiny incendiary missiles. They had once been men and women, human beings, and now their corpses would sink blackened beneath the current of the river and vanish.

"What a mess," he said to himself as the others screamed and cried with relief.

"We made it, don't you hear?" Ellis said, and kissed him with unbridled enthusiasm, his fingernails digging in behind Nick's ears.

He heard nothing but the high ringing sound of his mind, running around the pinwheeling rotors.

"It's all burned up," he said. "Everyone."

That pleasant glow in Ellis's eyes dimmed and then went out.

"You sure got a way of wrecking things," Rochelle told him.

He always had.

* * *

Without the pills, Ellis was darkly emotional. Nick sometimes woke up at night to see him sitting up and staring blankly at his hands. At those times, Nick would draw him into his arms and Ellis would let out a strangled noise like he was ready to cry, but it never quite crested into tears.

"I'm so afraid," he rasped against Nick's sleep-cool skin. "I'm afraid of dreaming."

Once, five years ago, they both woke up at the same time screaming from that same dreadful image, the nightmare that was the death of Coach, the way his guts spilled out into the swamp water and were buoyed there, spreading red into the surrounding muck, as he screamed and his eyes rolled back and blood spilled down his chin like a fountain.

"Oh, God, I'm so sorry!" Rochelle had been screaming as he fell back and disturbed the water around him, and he was gone, dead, sinking into the soft mud. She dropped her shotgun and curled her trembling fingers around her lower lip to hold back her hysterical shrieks. You couldn't scream out there, because it would bring more of them – there was no time to be human, to be afraid.

There was nothing to do for him in the middle of the swamp. They dragged him to dry land and set him on fire, afraid to take the time to bury him in the stench and underbrush. The heat was pale and listless in the surrounding mugginess, and through it all Rochelle cried hard into Ellis shoulder. His face was colorless, darkening the bruises and the blood spattered over his skin.

The fire was what Nick dreamed about, that great spiraling tower of sour-smelling flame, so beautiful against the black and grainy green, the distant shadows of those lost to the infection.

Ellis dreamed about the blood, oozing down the curve of the hill, a dark red little trail. He dreamed about it touching the water, surrounding them in a lake of blood, as the fire cornered them between the two horrendous borders and he drowned in fire.

"I'm afraid of dreaming."

Nick wondered if there would ever be fresh air again.

* * *

Pyromania.

That was the word. Nick looked it up.

Having a word to identify it made it clinical and somehow less romantic. Suddenly now it was a symptom, this love he had for the delicate nuances of fire – the curve of a leaping flame, the way an inferno could tear down a structure, twisting metal, disintegrating the wood, the addictive smell of gasoline, of smoke, the way the air would sharpen and go thin, the thrust of heat. The fire did not speak to him. He was broken.

"What are you readin'?" Ellis asked, coming up behind him and running his hands over Nick's shoulders and down his chest, a familiar gesture that had long been absent. Nick tilted his head back to look at him and was surprised to see the mist of arousal in those blue eyes. It had been so long.

"Nothing," he said. "Why?"

He received no answer but a smoldering kiss that sparked the fire in him. There were no words, only scalding hands roaming over hot skin, their mouths meeting to form a perfect combustion. Nick suffocated on the heat, and it was good, ablaze deep in the pit of him as Ellis sat on him in the desk chair and rode him with the sort of fervor which had once been commonplace between them, years ago.

Ellis went off like a firecracker, loud and hot and relentless, and Nick held on for dear life. And between the hard bursts of desperation, where their molten hands left long bleeding marks in each other's skin, there was that lingering sweetness, that sense of coming home, the companionable and gentle love that sprung over years of familiarity – the eternal kind of love, foreign to the both of them but solid and blazing. And when it was over, they stayed within each other, lying on the floor even though it inevitably hurt Nick's back.

"What brought that on?" Nick asked, breathless and sated.

Ellis smiled sleepily, nuzzling up to him, and Nick felt a tender pang in his stomach as he realized how much he had missed this. "I don't know," Ellis said. "Maybe it was the medicine."

That must have been it. The medicine. Ellis's hair smelled natural, with a vague smokiness from Nick's cigarette, and it made him even more beautiful.

"I'm sorry," he whispered into that soft yellow hair, another rare apology, but Ellis was fast asleep.

Nick showered, rubbed his skin raw, but the steaming water could not put out what had begun to burn within him.

* * *

"It's fucked up," Francis told Nick. "Something's not right about it."

"I don't see anything wrong with it," Nick replied, swinging back and forth in the middle of the elementary school playground. They weren't supposed to be there, but it was a Saturday and the cops had better things to do than yell at two teenagers on a swing set.

"It's not normal," Frankie said again. He rubbed at his eyes with the flats of his hands as if exhausted.

"I wouldn't have pegged you as somebody who gave a shit, Frank," Nick said coldly. That was why they had gotten along in the first place.

"No! No." Sighing, Frankie rummaged around for a cigarette and lit it. "That wasn't what I meant, and you fucking know it."

They looked at each other for a very long time. Nick could hear the click-clack of Cookie's heels as she came back from the car.

"Look, I didn't mean it. Don't tell her, okay?"

A strained little chuckle came from Francis's throat, and pursed his lips around his cigarette and he was beautiful. Cookie came back, her hair golden, her pretty red mouth working around a stick of chewing gum, and she washed out Frankie's prettiness like a star in the face of the sun. Her fire conquered his tiny flame.

"Cooks," Nick cooed, and she said, "Nicky" in that sweet adoring voice, and Francis, scowling, swung higher and higher.

He knew all of the bits and pieces, what added Nick up. He was split finely between them. But it wasn't enough. He was looking for that final burn, that bigger and more beautiful conflagration.

* * *

"I've done something awful to you," Nick said quietly.

Ellis looked up from where he was searching for a beer in the fridge. His mouth quirked into an uncertain smile, but his eyes spoke of a more mature disappointment. "I know," he said. "I know."

"He told you?"

Grabbing a beer, Ellis kicked the refrigerator door shut. "I figure," he said, and started picking at the cap with one stubby fingernail. He looked young and beaten and lovely, and also middle-aged and tired and war-stricken. Nick knew the two halves perfectly, how they fit synchronously in this complex life as it fell into cinders.

"I love you." The words came out in a quick rush, a phrase rarely said.

"I know," Ellis said. He didn't look up. His eyebrows pinched slightly together. "I guess I know."

Nick lit a cigarette in his shaking hands. He felt dark with shame.

* * *

As a teenage boy, he bought a dress. A little black thing with lace on the bottom. He wore it once, secretly, while his father was out on a business trip. It filled him with a scorching thrill. He lay back on his bed and masturbated in it, loving the feeling of the silky material touching his skin. It was private and dirty and raw – just him alone, the sound of his skin, the rustling of the dress as it hiked up over his hips. It was something he had never before dared to do.

Even though his father was gone, miles away, Nick sat up afterwards and held the flimsy dress in his hands and he heard that angry voice. It pounded in his ears.

It felt strange to do it and not get caught.

So he lit it up, that little black dress, in the back yard. He watched it waver, curl and burn. And he felt full of a hard justice, as if he had shaken off some darker part of himself and condemned it – but so too he felt empty. And after it was burned, after the remains had caught in the wind and been carried away, he let himself press up against the side of his house and cry. The tears were hot and slick, tasted salty and bitter in his mouth, the fuel of a greater inferno.

When that was done, he went to the store and bought a pack of matches. He filled up a gallon of gasoline. He bought a bottle of whiskey ("for my dad") and drank a quarter of it before he started to feel genuinely ill and dazed. And he went out behind the school and lit the dumpster on fire.

He remembered that baptism, the way the pulse of the explosion knocked him back onto the pavement and skinned his elbows, the way his face felt hot enough to be burning but it wasn't, the way he could gather no air. The shrapnel whizzing over his head. But more than that, before the powerful impact with the earth, he was lifted into the air and thrown as if by a massive beast, and in that moment he was airborne he looked up and saw a sky full of fire, full of great yellow flames lashing out like hands. He felt carried in a liquid fire to the mouth of God.

He hit the ground, striking his head, and as he sat watching the fire began to blur and double in twin brilliance before blackness took up everything and there was no more.

It was a perfect fire, Nick thought, but it was not enough. The craving stayed.

* * *

Ellis was asleep. Nick sat beside him, lit a match and closed his hand around it, feeling the spiking pain as it snuffed out against his naked palm.

Only the moon watched him as he lit another match and another, again and again, until the skin on his hand was red and blistered. He gritted his teeth against the pain and against the building moan of pleasure.

It wasn't enough. The tiny golden glow was not enough.

* * *

On Thursday, Ellis went to work. He downed his orange juice quickly and left a kiss on Nick's cheek, something he almost never did, and they looked at each other and maybe, maybe Ellis saw what was going to happen there in Nick's eyes. Maybe he knew and couldn't bring himself to stop it.

"I'll see you later," Ellis said. "Okay?"

"Sure."

"No. I'll see you later. Okay?"

"Okay."

"Okay." Ellis put his hands in his pockets and shifted, on the precipice of staying and going, and then finally he left in a brush of warm air.

Nick showered and shaved. He got dressed. He had a light breakfast. He walked down to the gas station and filled up two heavy red cans. They reminded him of some distant, bloody memory. He bought a pack of cigarettes and smoked them on the way home, part of him wishing the spark would ignite the fumes from the cans, but they did not. He left the gas cans at home, went to the park and sat by the lake. He sat there for an hour, watching the water lap at the shore, the birds swimming in its blue depths. A little boy ran up and down the bank, throwing bread crumbs. The air was nice and dry and hot, pierced by the dull blade of the sun, uninterrupted by clouds.

The hunger started in him. It stirred and flared in him. There was no stopping this monster.

Drawing himself up, Nick walked home. He came through the door, locking it behind him, and set about disabling all of the fire alarms. He uncapped the gasoline and flung it at random about the apartment, until the curtains and the bedclothes were soaked, the couches were soaked, the carpet was soaked. It was a systematic process, and he was finished by lunchtime. Ellis would be coming home soon.

Nick went into the bathroom and found the matches. He lit one for the sake of it, put it out with his fingers. Then he went into the bedroom and lit another one. He flicked it onto the bed and watched the room go up immediately. That was when everything started to go soft and aquatic, sort of drifting between some undetermined lines of reality, at the point where two universes converged. Nick floated into the other room, lighting matches as he went. The house began to glow.

It all began to add up to a perfect crescendo, a perfect ignition, a perfect fire. This, the sum of every little blaze.

Nick hung his jacket on the coat rack and then sat down against the wall, watching the inferno light on the gasoline and leap from surface to surface like a living animal. It crept closer and he watched it with a fixed smile, registering faint fear but something even more than that, a powerful elation.

He tasted it, thick and stinging like metal on his tongue; he laid his head back against the wall and smiled into the vortex of heat. It built up and it whirled about the room, swelling in an orange brilliance, as outside Ellis pounded on the door and screamed for Nick to get out. The smoke swallowed everything, the roaring voice of the fire drowning out all noise, until there was nothing but that gravitational pull, the sweet smell of gasoline, and no escape.

A beautiful fire, a beautiful burn.

-- fin


End file.
